Goosifer's [Normal] Projects

[Goosifer]

Thank you jbl, great ideas! I'm slowly implementing them. Added windows (thank you to Vondell's wonderful texture work), and messed with the shaders a bit.

 

On 9/3/2025 at 2:34 AM, Goosifer said:

Not the best progress shot but here's the WIP animal nutrition center:

 

 

I'm thinking I'll line it with with foliage and some rocks, and the empty corner in the back will be a sort of outdoor staging area, maybe hay bales or fruits and veggies on display. Any ideas to make it a bit more whimsical in Zoo Tycoon tradition?

 

Still missing all the lil decorations that makes ZT1 buildings what they are.

[jbl89]

The extra colors already make for a big improvement IMHO :)

 

Bonus points if you could also make the roof recolorable, but from experience I know that's a big hassle for a small gain 😅  

 

( I asked ChatGPT for funs and giggles to come up with a ZT1 building and add some decorative elements, it accidentally also came up with a bunny an carrot without any special hint to do so 😂  . But the result was more like a gameboy color game )

[Goosifer]

Oh my goodness, I was just talking to the other modders about this yesterday. Looks like a few of us have given ingame color swatches a try to varying success. I wish Particle were still around since I know he seems have had some luck there. I'll let you know if I'm able to figure it out because making the entire prop set recolorable would be amazing.

[jbl89]

I think I've done it once, for a combination of an umbrella on top of a picnic table. Successfully. 

I cheated a bit, as for the graphics I started out with one of the in-game umbrellas.

 

The key was making sure you only had a specific number of colors (or at least not exceed it, it was something like probably 8 or 16 "colors" - e.g. shades of red) that you had to put in the .pal file at specific places, all below each other.

 

To make it easier - you could probably start with a very eccentric color for the roof; take care of what I wrote in the previous block; and then Zoo Tycoon will fill it with its own palette. (I think I added some feature at some point in ZT Studio to load the custom palettes that are in the game with all the different shades that the end user can ultimately select, as they seemed shared between all the objects. I could be wrong, memory is a bit hazy after 6 years :') ).

 

 

Edit: Pic => 

 

I notice how in the comment I also made the remark that you should use the same .PAL file for all views. 
Technically speaking, I think you could probably ignore that; but then you'll need to have the colors in the right place in each .PAL file.

 

This comment contains more info from back in the days.

 

 

I know you were interested in forking ZT Studio - feel free to go ahead. 
I also added a GitHub "issue" that describes some  AI suggested improvements to speed things up. 
I was just messing around in VB.Net back in the days, discovering and analyzing the ZT1 graphics bit by bit and I wasn't that experienced back in the days when I wrote the code.

[Goosifer]

I appreciate the detailed explanation! I think this mostly makes sense, but honestly once I try I'll likely hit a few walls haha. I'll try picking your brain if I run into those. Interesting that the number of colors is limited per swatch. Potentially that might make this a bit harder than I though.

 

6 hours ago, jbl89 said:

I know you were interested in forking ZT Studio - feel free to go ahead. 

 

I've ended up taking a different route for now. The reason for that is I'm coding a mod loader called PANDA and a lot of the infrastructure I've already built that can read configuration files, graphics, and zip files I think can be reused to create a full-on APE-like featureset within the loader. It's also coded in Qt/C++ which I'm a lot more familiar with.

 

(Higher resolution link)

 

6 hours ago, jbl89 said:

also added a GitHub "issue" that describes some  AI suggested improvements to speed things up. 

 

Coincidentally, I tried to parallelize the graphics decoder I wrote based off of your wonderful ZT1 graphics documentation on Github but didn't get much speedup. I think removing all debug messages definitely helped a ton (from my own code), but due to the nature of indexed graphics and how tiny the sprites are, it didn't feel like the effort was totally worth it. That said, I think there's tons of potential for speedup for batch processing graphics and concurrent decoding, but I figured I'd deal with pthreads or GPU stuff a little later in the decoder life-cycle. I've been too lazy to write an encoder, for example lol. My brain freezes when I try to decide where I want to start with that.

[Goosifer]

animal nutrition center

 

 

[Fern]

I need to find them but I am sure there is some food you can buy to feed the animals if you want it to sell things.

[Goosifer]

Guests can feed animals?

[Fern]

You can buy food to feed them but they actually don't. Although you could have food removed if you went to a building that housed animals and was programmed to do it. I actually had some buildings in mind to make, when we made this.

 

7644: Animal Feed
37644: Animal Feed. Guests will be thrilled from the attention they receive when they feed animals such as those in petting zoos.
62644: Oh, boy... animal feed! Now I can feed some animals, where I'm allowed.

[Truly_happy]

5 hours ago, Goosifer said:

animal nutrition center

 

 

 

Me gusta. ("I like it.")